Adapting the Garden to the Gardener
Of course, this meant I had to plant stuff. For one thing, without the grass as camouflage, the ripening foliage was terribly obvious. But for another thing - the gardening bug had bit and I was eager to see if I could turn that area into something beautiful.
Unfortunately, each bed was backed by a gigantic tree. On one side was an ancient sycamore, on the other an equally huge maple. I soon discovered what fibrous roots were - mats of tangles little hair-like stuff that seemed impervious to my admittedly cheap and inadequate) trowel. I had no notion of the importance of a good tool and considered these $1.99 drugstore specials as disposables. Unfortunately, with a drugstore special you can't saw through fibrous roots. Nor can you chop easily at those larger roots that are so close to the surface of the soil with trees of this kind. And we won't even talk about the fieldstones that lie so plentifully under the soil surface that needed to be pried out, one by one. You can't dig in anything but superb soil with a flimsy garden tool - but I had no idea that there were better tools out there. Remember - I was a total beginner. So every plant that went in represented hours of sawing and hacking, sweating and regrets. And so I chopped and sawed and somehow managed to get several hostas and other shade lovers into that ground, where, needless to say, they lived but struggled.
Needless to say, that, too, got old really fast.
But when the garden bug has bitten, there is rarely a cure. All that sweat and toil seemed somehow worth it when the plants grew and the flowers began to bloom.
Besides, having placed an order from a mail order bulb company put me on some sort of mailing list. Suddenly my mailbox was stuffed with garden catalogs of all varieties. I read all of then with the eagerness with which a starving person peruses a menu. I wanted it all.
And I had at least two acres of land in which to put everything.
And so I did, until, on our 20th anniversary of living in this house, I counted 14 separate gardening areas. Needless to say, I learned a lot during that time. Probably the most important things that I learned came during about 7 years of summer drought.
These were years when I
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